Page 92 of Vengeance

Ten Years Later

Butcher hadn’t expected the news to hit him the way it did. Savage was gone.

Hell, the man had always lived like he was bulletproof, like nothing could touch him—not cops, not rivals, not even time. But time had a way of collecting debts, and Savage had been living on borrowed minutes for years. His wife and husband both knew it. Everyone did. The old Prez’s heart had been a ticking time bomb, but Savage was too damn stubborn to let anyone fix it.

Butcher sat on the edge of his bed, the phone still feeling much too heavy in his hand. He was almost twenty years younger than Savage, but it didn’t matter. Death didn’t careabout age. It cared about pride, about choices, about the kind of man who thought he could outrun his own body.

He should’ve felt nothing. He had left Huntsville and the Royal Bastards ten years ago, and Savage had been the reason he walked away, the reason he’d spent a decade carving out a life without the patch, without the brotherhood. He had gone it alone and told himself that was what he wanted. But instead, guilt twisted in his gut. Because once upon a time, Savage had been more than a Prez. He’d been a brother. He was a friend, and a man whom Butcher had bled beside, fought beside, and believed in. And now he was gone.

He didn’t really regret running from the Bastards that night. He had landed in a little town called Natchez, Mississippi. Butcher opened a body shop, and business was booming from the very beginning. People loved that they didn’t have to drive three towns over just to have their vehicles worked on. His specialty was bikes, but he worked on everything over the years to pay the bills. He was able to buy a little piece of land on the edge of town and build his dream home. Those things wouldn’t have happened if he had stuck around Huntsville and stayed with the Bastards. But leaving his friends and club behind was the hardest thing that he had ever done. He had become a loner, and looking for a new club wasn’t even on his to-do list.

Butcher dragged a hand down his face, the weight of his memories pressing him harder than he wanted to admit. He thought about the fight, the betrayal, and the way he’d thrown his kutte down and walked out into the night. He thought of the silence that followed, the years spent pretending he didn’t care. But the truth was, he did care. He always had.

Savage’s death wasn’t just the end of a man’s life. It was the end of an era. And for Butcher, it was the beginning of something he couldn’t yet name—something that felt likereckoning, like unfinished business clawing its way back to the surface.

Princess

Princess hated the sound of her car sputtering down the backroads of the Podunk town she was driving through. It was making the kind of coughing sound that meant trouble, the kind that made her stomach sink before the dashboard lights even started to flicker. She pulled over to the side of the road, cursing under her breath as steam curled from under the hood. She wasn’t a mechanic, but she was sure that was a bad sign.

“Of course this is happening,” she muttered to herself. “Because the universe loves to screw with me.” She wasn’t wrong. In the past year alone, she had more troubles than she had had her entire life. Sure, she had lived a pretty pampered life with her father being the head of the largest mob family in Chicago, but that was a life she was trying to forget. It was a life that she was currently running from because going back to her father and his rules wasn’t something she ever wanted to do.

She got out of her car and popped the hood, staring at the mess of metal and wires, and knew instantly she was out of her depth. She could handle a lot—hell, she’d survived worse than a busted engine—but cars weren’t her thing.

Finding a tow truck driver to pick her up from the side of the road at this hour wasn’t an easy task—but hard tasks were herspecialty. She had someone out to her location within the hour, and the tow truck driver gave her one option for someone who could repair her car—Butcher’s Body Shop.

Princess almost laughed at the name of the place. It had butcher right in the title, but she had no choice. She was out of options if she wanted her car fixed, so she agreed to let the nice tow truck driver drop both her and her car off at Butcher’s Body Shop.

As soon as she jumped down out of the tow truck, nearly breaking her damn ankle in the heels that she chose to wear for the day, she instantly regretted her decision. The place was lined wall to wall with motorcycles, and that had red flags dancing in her head. She knew bikers were bad news—especially bikers who didn’t belong to a club. At least, that was what her father used to tell her. They were his number one problem around Chicago, and he used to grumble about them daily. They were wild cards, rogue assholes who didn’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. Still, she didn’t have a choice in the matter.

A tall, good-looking man walked out of what she assumed was an office area. His sleeves were rolled up, and grease was streaked across his forearm. He looked like the kind of man who had been carved out of grit and regret. Her father would not have approved of her dealing with a man like him, and that thought had her smiling to herself.

Princess squared her shoulders, refusing to let him see the hesitation crawling under her skin. “My car’s dead,” she said flatly, tossing the keys onto the counter. “Fix it.” She was used to giving orders, but the biker standing in front of her looked like he wasn’t used to receiving them. He stood there, looking between her and the keys that she had tossed to the counter, smirking. Yeah, maybe making demands and giving orders worked for her in Chicago, but in rural Mississippi, she had a feeling that she wasn’t going to be so lucky.

The guy looked over at her, his eyes dark and unreadable. For a moment, she thought he might tell her to get lost. But instead, he picked up the keys, turning them over in his hand like they weighed more than the metal that they were made of.

“Does bossing people around usually work for you, honey?” he drawled.

“My name isn’t honey,” she insisted, “it’s Princess.” She inwardly cringed, knowing that her given name wasn’t much better than the little pet name he had assigned to her. But there was no accounting for her parents’ bad taste in names or the fact that her father thought of her as a fucking princess since the day he found out that she was going to be a girl.

He chuckled. “Well, that’s much better,” he mumbled more to himself than to her.

“Can you work on my car or not?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. She was too tired to keep playing games with the oversized mechanic.

“Sure, it’s just going to take me some time to get the parts that I’ll need,” he said. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes at him. He didn’t even know what was wrong with her car, yet he was sure that it would take time to get the parts.

“How do you know that the parts will take time to be delivered if you don’t even know what’s wrong with my car?” she asked.

“You don’t trust me,” he said, voice low, almost amused.

Princess crossed her arms. “I don’t trust anyone, so don’t be offended.”

“Okay, no offense taken then. The parts will take some time because getting anything delivered to this town takes forever. I’ve been doing this for ten years now, and I can tell you that it’s going to take a few weeks to get any parts delivered. But from what I’ve noticed so far about your car, you’re going to need a new radiator.”

The tow truck driver had unloaded her poor car and waved back at the guy. “See you later, Butcher,” he drawled. “Good luck with this one.” She wanted to protest and ask him just what he meant by that comment, but he was in his truck and driving down the dirt road before she could even open her mouth.

Princess decided to concentrate all her frustrations on the man standing in front of her. “So, you’re Butcher?” she asked.

He gave a slight nod. “I am,” he said.